Potential use of land worries UAlbany neighbors

College interested in buying McKownville parcels, but any potential use is undecided

By JORDAN CARLEO-EVANGELIST Staff writer

Updated 9:30 pm, Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Photo: John Carl D'Annibale

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One of two houses in the wooded tract between Norwood Street and Waverly Place in Guilderland. University at Albany's interest in the land and another nearby parcel has neighbors wary. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union) less

One of two houses in the wooded tract between Norwood Street and Waverly Place in Guilderland. University at Albany's interest in the land and another nearby parcel has neighbors wary. (John Carl D'Annibale / ... more

Photo: John Carl D'Annibale

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One of two houses in the wooded tract between Norwood Street and Waverly Place in Guilderland. University at Albany's interest in the land and another nearby parcel has neighbors wary. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union) less

One of two houses in the wooded tract between Norwood Street and Waverly Place in Guilderland. University at Albany's interest in the land and another nearby parcel has neighbors wary. (John Carl D'Annibale / ... more

Photo: John Carl D'Annibale

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Entrance to Nicholas Lane, at right, from Norwood Street in Guilderland. The University at Albany's interest in the land and another nearby parcel has neighbors wary. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union) (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union) less

Entrance to Nicholas Lane, at right, from Norwood Street in Guilderland. The University at Albany's interest in the land and another nearby parcel has neighbors wary. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union) ... more

Photo: John Carl D'Annibale

Potential use of land worries UAlbany neighbors

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GUILDERLAND -- The University at Albany is eyeing nine acres of private, thickly wooded land off Norwood Street and Waverly Place, alarming nearby residents that the university may be readying to breach its long-standing campus boundary.

Holt-Harris, whose former home is one of two still on the land, is also a past chairman of UAlbany's University Council.

The tract is actually is composed of two neighboring parcels owned by Holt-Harris' daughter and son and listed together for $1.6 million. On June 29, university leaders, including President George Philip, met with the board of the McKownville Improvement Association to express their interest in the land just south of the university ring road, said the neighborhood group's president, Don Reeb, a Norwood Street resident who spent 34 years teaching economics at UAlbany.

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Karl Luntta, a university spokesman, confirmed UAlbany's interest in the land. However, when asked about rumors that it could become home to new athletic and gymnasium facilities, he said it was too soon to speculate.

Luntta said the university is interested in the land for "a fair price" but added: "We have not determined what we would use the land for, should we acquire it."

UAlbany is currently in the midst of a master planning process, which will serve as a playbook for the university's development over the next decade.

On tax records, one parcel is formally listed as 100-200 Nicholas Lane, a private road off Norwood Street, just west of the university's Western Avenue entrance. The other is listed as 18 Waverly Place. Together, the town assesses them at $597,900.

Reeb said university officials indicated that the asking price is above what the school wants to pay but said UAlbany's interest is alarming nonetheless because it would represent the first time the university has breached the 50-year boundaries of its uptown campus.

"The footprint of the university will have never been violated up until now," Reeb said of the campus, which sits almost entirely inside the city of Albany on the former site of the Albany Country Club but borders McKownville to the south and west.

Recent growth on the sprawling uptown campus has been on land already owned by the university -- most notably the College of Nanoscale Sciences and Engineering's three Nanofab facilities on the west side of Fuller Road and Liberty Terrace, a controversial 500-bed dorm currently rising in the campus' southeastern corner near Albany's Tudor Road.

The Liberty Terrace project involved about 12 acres of wooded land, including 3.3 from the Harriman State Office Campus to the northeast of the college campus.

Acquisition of the Holt-Harris land, however, would represent active expansion into a neighborhood already wary of the shadow of its large institutional neighbor.

Reeb said the association's board is united its opposition to the potential purchase, citing concerns about noise, lights, parking, traffic, and storm water runoff. Reeb also cited a promise he said was made when the uptown campus was built in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the university would not look to expand into the surrounding community.

Reeb said he believes that UAlbany's stifled efforts to expand further into the Harriman Campus have forced it to look instead to the hamlet of McKownville.

Town Supervisor Kenneth Runion said he could not recall another example of the university acquiring private land dating at least to the 1980s and added that McKownville residents are right to be skeptical.

"They have had a lot of growth and a lot of development around them," Runion said, adding that any plans for an intensive use of the property would be "very disrespectful" to the neighborhood.

He did, however, note that using the land to build a president's residence might be a use both the university and neighborhood could live with.

"In order for SUNY to put something on that property that didn't impact that neighborhood, they would have to put in some substantial buffering," he said, adding that the potential loss of tax revenue to the town from the property being sold to the tax-exempt university would not be significant. "I do hope that ... if they do decide they want to purchase it, they purchase it with a view toward a more residential purpose."